Brindafella writes "Brindafella reports that Redhat is flying in space as the OS for Canada's Smallest Satellite: The Canadian Advanced Nanospace eXperiment (CanX-1)[300k PDF], one of the flock of 1kg pico-satellites launched on 1 July 03 by a Russian rocket. Redhat eCos stands for embedded Configurable operating system, an open source real-time operating system (eCos Home Page). See the eCos Programmer's Guide for the CubeSat Computer: Introduction, Hardware Model, Development Setup, and Loading the eCos. The CANX-1 site at the University of Toronto, Canada gives more details, such as: The satellite is a 10cm cube, with a mass less than one kilogram; The satellite will generate about two Watts of peak power using direct energy conversion; Main Computer Board - Atmel AT91R40807 based on ARM7TDMI Thumb Processor, 40 MHz, 1 MB SRAM, 32 MB Flash, 200 mW max, 98 x 96 x 8 mm."

WirelessMan asks "I work for a certain university in the US, and our IT department has just deployed IEEE 802.1x authentication for our wireless network. One of the benefits is that all users' sessions are encrypted using tumbling WEP keys. One of the (major) drawbacks is the 'newness' of 1x. As far as I can tell (Google, etc) there aren't a whole lot of places out there who have taken the plunge. Google it, or check out this brief description. Does the Slashdot community have any experience with 1x?"

Anonymous Coward writes "Finally, a much awaited review of enterprise OSes. The guys from NW Test Alliance pitted Red Hat, UnitedLinux, and Windows against each other and rated them on several rubrics. Red Hat won by a slight margin on the basis of its high hardware compatibility and strong security integration."

hobsonchoice writes "SCO has issued a letter saying SCO Linux customers won't be sued. The same does not seem to apply if using a non-SCO distribution such as RedHat." LightSail points to the SCO letter itself, and raises an interesting point: "If they approve the use of 'their' IP in Linux in a single kernel, then the GPL holds that IP SCO allows to be used by a select few must be freely released to any and all. It appears that all Linux users everywhere were just given a license to continued use of Linux even if SCO would win their suit with IBM." And Haikuu writes "eWeek recently posted an interview conducted by e-mail exchange with Linus Torvalds regarding his recent move to the OSDL and the SCO suit."

SPK writes "A colleague and I recently discussed how New Riders's most highly regarded book -- Paul DuBois's MySQL -- corresponds to O'Reilly's worst dud: MySQL & mSQL. Charles Bookman's Linux Clustering does nothing to improve New Riders's reputation. The book is divided into eleven chapters, unevenly distributed among three sections: an overview of clustering for Linux, building clusters, and maintaining clusters. Four appendices provide brief information about online clustering resources, options for RedHat's 'Kickstart,' options for DHCP, and information on 'Condor ClassAd Machine Attributes.'" To find out why Krause was so displeased with this book, read on below for his review.

Dan Clough writes "I read this book to improve my knowledge of Linux networking, and in that regard it was a huge success! It was also an enjoyable and easy-to-read book. I am pretty much a Linux beginner, and know 'enough to be dangerous.' My existing home LAN consists of 5 machines: one running Mandrake Linux 9.1, one RedHat 9 (laptop), two Windows XP, and one Windows 98. These are connected to a commercial (Siemens Speedstream) router/switch and share internet access via a cable modem. All the computers can communicate with each other and share files, using Samba. The router also functions as a print-server for a laser printer, which the Linux machines print to via CUPS." Whether your network is bigger, smaller, or hypothetical, Dan's review (below) suggests that O'Reilly's Linux Network Administrator's Guide, 2nd Edition would be useful to have at hand as you build or troubleshoot. Read on for the rest.

Bruha writes "Lewt over at Warcry News Network has written his review for Ximian Desktop 2 targeted at the home users that are looking for a good desktop solution. He mentions this is a good product that could be bundled with Redhat or Mandrake to provide a one stop solution for the desktop user where they dont have to install any extra software to fully surf the web. Which you do with KDE/Gnome installs of most distro's."

Jonathan Larmour points out the "release of eCos 2.0, the configurable RTOS for the deeply embedded market. This release features a new licence based on the GPL, but with an exception to make it more suitable for embedded use. It's also now an independent free software project from the original developers Red Hat (which bought Cygnus Solutions) after the development team was canned. Most of the team still work on eCos but for different companies. It also has a wide range of ports but has managed to keep a low profile, which should now change with the new stable release. More at http://ecos.sourceware.org/ "

You asked nmap creator Fyodor many excellent questions, and his answers (below) are just as excellent. You'll want to set aside significant time to read and digest this interview, because Fyodor didn't just toss off a few words, but put some real time and energy into his answers.

MoreDruid asks: "Not long ago, I was asked to do some research for a blind relative from a friend of mine. I tried searching the sites of Red Hat, Debian, and some other distro's, but only SuSe came up with really useful information. I did find Blinux, but I think it's not really mature yet. Do any other Slashdotters have any experience in this field? What is a good distro to start with? This research is geared towards a blind newbie user, so are there any decent resources for vision impaired people so that he can get going with Linux?" This topic was discussed, in a more general sense, some two years ago, and there have since been questions dealing with several pieces of the puzzle. However, is there anything else out there, aside from the developing Blinux, that puts it all together in one nice package?

An anonymous reader writes "Sun announced the new V60x and V65x servers (1U and 2U respectively). The 1U has 2.8GHz Xeon CPUs and the 2U has 3.06GHz Xeon CPUs. They also announced a partnership with RedHat and Oracle running on these boxes. RedHat will also start shipping Sun's Java with their distribution."

AEton writes "According to this Extremetech article, X-Tra Fun has developed a Bluetooth module for the Gameboy Advance which is expected to ship by Christmas 2003. The $49 module includes Bluetooth connectivity, although a cellphone or other Bluetooth device with Internet access is required to use the Internet, and it comes with an embedded eCos Linux kernel with a Web browser and 255 pages' worth of cache. A $99 upgrade adds a Secure Digital card slot and a dongle!"

An anonymous reader writes "Thought the Firebird naming conflict was over? Think again! (If you thought, "What naming conflict?", go to the back of the class and read Slashdot's, previous coverage.) MozillaZine has got an exclusive interview with Christopher Blizzard, mozilla.org staff member, Red Hat employee and author of the Mozilla branding strategy. It's one the first official statements from mozilla.org (Mitchell Baker published a letter that she sent to the Firebird database project admins a few days ago). As well as the interview, MozillaZine also takes a look at some of the more recent media coverage of the conflict, which is overwealmingly biased in favour of the Firebird database project (who still haven't adequately explained how it was different when they picked the same name as the older Firebird BBS). Compare and contrast with MozillaZine's interview of Ann Harrison of the Firebird database project."

andyring writes "According to Cnet, RedHat and Fujitsu signed a partership agreement where the companies will jointly develop and market for Fujitsu's products. Fujitsu hs a strong presence in Asia, a place Microsoft has been trying to cultivate."

DarkOx writes "There is a new patch from Ingo Molnar which can prevent overflow attacks. The scoop from KernelTrap is as follows: Ingo Molnar has announced a new kernel-based security feature for Linux/x86 called 'Exec Shield'. He describes the patch, which is against the 2.4.20-rc1 kernel, as: 'The exec-shield feature provides protection against stack, buffer or function pointer overflows, and against other types of exploits that rely on overwriting data structures and/or putting code into those structures. The patch also makes it harder to pass in and execute the so-called 'shell-code' of exploits. The patch works transparently, ie. no application recompilation is necessary.'"

HTMLSpinnr writes "Red Hat announced today it's release of GinGin64, a "Technology Preview" (read: not beta) of Red Hat's AMD64 technology. You can grab a copy here or at one of Red Hat's various mirrors. Though the version number listed in the release notes is 8.0.95, inside sources say it's based on Red Hat 9 plus some updates."

Dan writes "Jason Ish has updated the redhat/base OpenBSD port from Red Hat 6.2 to Red Hat 8.0. The email note is a few days old, but the port seems to have been committed yesterday. So far he has tested with Opera and Netscape. If you run any Linux apps on OpenBSD, you are encouraged to test these commits and provide feedback. (Several people have reported success running Opera 6.12, Opera7 with some tweaks, and Netscape)."

Sanjay writes "Official from Sun spokesman. Sun is considering using AMD's Opteron chip in a server it expects to deliver to the market shortly. Intead of fighting Win of Wintel (like Redhat is doing), Sun can choose to fight both with Linux AMD's servers and also fight with HP/IBM as Itanium is anyway a non starter. Sun can rise again! "

Slashback is packed tonight with updates and clarifications on several fronts: read on below for, among other things, BitTorrent download stats after the recent Red Hat 9 release, the BSA's questionable statistical methods when it comes to calculating incentives and losses in the source-secret software world, and (can you believe?) yet another way to assemble an eerie pulsing light fixture.

Gentu writes "Red Hat Linux 9 has been released to the official mirrors, brace for impact! Additionally, OSNews features an interview with Red Hat Linux's manager, Matt Wilson and they discuss everything from mp3/dvd playback, to Randr, dependancy policies and more." Also on the Red Hat front, DdJ writes "So, I noticed that Red Hat's stock price jumped up a bit this morning, and checked the news to find out why. It turns out they've released a new portal product and a new CMS product. Both appear to be based on Java/Tomcat, which would mean it's not Zope-based or Zend-based. But, they're supposedly open source. Anyone have any further info on this stuff yet?" Update: 04/08 05:24 GMT by T : Don't forget that the new Red Hat release is available through BitTorrent, too.